Mairi Miller: Nanometrics

As Head of Corporate Marketing at Nanometrics, Mairi’s done some pretty interesting stuff when it comes to understanding her customers.  Beginning with the creation of a “Customer Experience Taskforce,” she found ways to gather deep insights about the difficulties her customers — mostly scientists measuring shifts in the earth — face daily. From there, she focused on how Nanometrics could improve their experience.

Here’s what she had to say:

1. Even smart customers appreciate user friendly products
   We first formed the Customer Experience Taskforce because we felt distanced from our customers — we were designing products for people that we hardly knew. We decided to do a bunch of in-person interviews to get to know them better, and the results were astounding.One interview stands out in particular: We talked to a group of scientists that had just returned from the South Pole. These folks had had a less-than-stellar experience with our equipment, but not for the reason we expected!The equipment itself worked perfectly. The pain point was in actually deploying the equipment and setting it up. We’d assumed that these scientists, as smart as they were, would have the same technical know-how that a group of engineers would. Not so — they were experts in reading the data, not in how our tools worked.

   From these interviews, we realized there was a large gap in our offering when it came to giving scientists a user-friendly experience. We also uncovered a brand new opportunity for expanding our business by offering installation services and engineering expertise.

2. To influence change, focus on the preexisting pain points within your own company.As a marketer, it became obvious to me that we could learn a lot from an in-depth, intentional study of our customer base. But part of the struggle was convincing everyone else internally — engineers and C-suite alike — that the project would be worthwhile.Eventually, we found that we could make our case for forming the Customer Experience Taskforce most effectively by framing it in terms of a pain point the company was already experiencing. We decided to focus on a somewhat recently released product that was underperforming, and aimed our pitch to our executive staff around getting customer feedback in order to improve sales.

   The response was fantastic. Instead of a resource-sucking side project, the taskforce was now directly in line with an existing company initiative.

3. Data is only meaningful when aggregated; and presentation style matters.When you interview people, especially scientists, you end up gathering a ton of feedback. I mean, a ton. And it’s messy, too — not all of it will fit nicely into buckets, and aggregating it into something useful can be tricky.As we began collecting data, we started to get very excited about what we were finding. But, we had to wait to share it with the team — we knew that sharing the raw data would be overwhelming and potentially misleading to others that weren’t looking at all the findings at once.

   Despite the eagerness of others in the company, we decided to keep our findings confidential until we could present them all at once. I’m glad we did. We were able to curate the most powerful stories and the most impactful feedback, and deliver it all in one cohesive presentation that contributed to repositioning our company from a product manufacturer to one that offers services, too.

Powerful stuff! (And we’re talking about earthquakes here, so the bar is high!) I had one more question for Mairi, of course: “Dr. Strange or Dr. Who?”

I loved Mairi’s answer: “I never saw Dr. Strange, but Dr. Who creeped me out as a kid! Now, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, those are my favorites!”

Fair enough! See you next month.